A place for librarians to get and share information, ideas and inspiration about serving youth of all ages--and their caregivers. Especially for librarians in west-central Wisconsin's Indianhead Federated Library System.

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Monday, September 26, 2011

Wow! Flannel Boards!

Everyone knows that a good, old-fashioned flannel board story, or a story with some props, will never, ever, ever go out of style in the storytime circuit. Even if you aren't that comfortable with telling stories without their books, flannel stories are a terrific way to expand your offerings and keep your audience engaged.

So, how exciting to discover that there is a group called Flannel Friday, that allows youth services librarians to share their super-cool, creative, beautiful ideas for flannel boards. You might want to get right in there and share, or you might want to check it out for an extra burst of inspiration every Friday! Take a peek.

As I was tracing the path of Flannel Friday, I also came across a tool called Pinterest, a great way to organize the ideas you find online. Flannel Fridays has a page, and they are linked to one of our own--Jessi Peterson of the public library in Eau Claire. Jessi graciously filled me in a bit more about how Pinterest works. It's like a virtual pinboard, where you can pin photos that you find on the web and also upload your own photos. It's a great way to keep track of ideas you find. Cool tool!

She says:

It's nice because if I'm at home and see a flannel I think would be fun or something I think we ought to have at work I don't have to mess with an e-mail and a link, I just pin it to my board. Then I can find it again easily to show people at work...It's way nicer than bookmarkingsomething...often I get lost in the list because I can't quite remember what the bookmark was called, plus I can't get to them at work. I can troll through other people's pinboards for inspiration and sometimes a pin will lead back to a blog I want to follow or a website that has stuff I want. And some boards are collaborative where several people can post things to them...it might be a good tool for a department or a library system to share ideas visually amongst their members.

Oooh! Great idea! I'm not sure we should do this as a system, or if you should all just do this individually and share with each other informally, but it sure seems like it has some terrific potential. What do you think??